Faithful Catholic or modern-day pharisee? Sometimes I might be a bit of both.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Loving the Other—Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Cycle C)

Deut.
30:10–14; Col. 1:15–20; Luke 10:25–37

Who is your neighbor?
Who do you think of as neighbor? Is it the people in the houses closest to you?
The people down the street on the corner? The people in a 10 block radius?
Clearly Jesus thinks the term neighbor applies in a much more broad sense than
how we usually use it.

I admit to feeling
a twinge of guilt when I hear this parable. I can name maybe three of my close neighbors.
That seems so unlike how things were when I grew up. Back when I was in sixth
grade, I could name nearly every family on our street. I grew up watching Fred
Rogers singing his opening song inviting the viewer to be his neighbor. But we
don't seem to live in a world that believes in Mr. Roger's neighborhood
anymore. Maybe we never did. But certainly, we have it infinitely better than
the world of the first century, where casual barbarism, as I've heard one
scholar put it, ruled the day.

The setting
for Jesus' parable in this gospel reading today underscores that fact. A man
coming down from Jerusalem is waylaid, beaten, robbed, and left for dead on the
road to Jericho—a notoriously dangerous stretch of road during that time. Even
in modern times this has been the case, as this road was the supply line and
route to Jerusalem from the coast during the Israeli war of independence, and
the road is still littered with the wrecks of those vehicles ambushed during
that time. Anyway, Jesus tells us first that a priest walks down the same road,
and seeing the man left for dead, he crosses to the other side to continue his
journey. Then a Levite does the same. The commentaries often make the case that
the priest and Levite are on their way to Jerusalem to serve in the temple and
that they are trying to avoid the ritual impurity they'd incur by touching a
dead body, rendering them unable to fulfill their service. However, as I read
the passage, I noticed that they were coming down the road from Jerusalem, not
going up. And if you know anything about going to Jerusalem, you always go up
to it. Even today, for a Jewish person to go to Jerusalem is to make aliya—to
go up to Jerusalem. So the priest and Levite are returning from Jerusalem,
and hence, not in jeopardy of missing their term of service.

Before I
actually put all that together, I heard a great reflection on this parable from
Dr. Brant Pitre, and he confirmed my suspicion. He also pointed out that one mitzvah
or commandment for a pious Jew was the obligation to bury the dead. So what
Jesus is highlighting here is not the conflict between one commandment and
another, but of simple neglect to perform what one knows is just to anyone,
friend or enemy, neighbor or stranger.

So who is our
neighbor? That's what the scribe asks. Jews of the first century had varying
opinions. Leviticus 19:17-18 says to love your neighbor as yourself, as the
scribe rightly notes. Some interpretations only included other Jews as
neighbors, but Leviticus 19:33-34 says that one must also love the stranger in
your midst as yourself. If this is the case, the stranger is treated as a
neighbor. So Jesus is not teaching anything that the Torah didn't already
teach. He's simply pointing out to the scribe, who should know better, the
truth of the matter. Your neighbor is not just the one like you but may well be
one who is quite different and might even hold contrary values to you—in short,
your enemy. And Jews and Samaritans of the time were, in fact, bitter enemies.

But what the
parable demonstrates is that mercy is not some lofty concept that we have to
struggle to grasp. It's right there in our hearts. We all know what mercy looks
like. The scribe recognized it in the actions of the Samaritan easily enough.
In our first reading from Deuteronomy 30, Moses makes note as well: "It is not in the
heavens, that you should say, 'Who will go up to the heavens to get it for us
and tell us of it, that we may do it?' Nor is it across the sea, that you
should say, 'Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we
may do it?' No, it is something very near to you, in your mouth and in your
heart, to do it."

In Catholic
moral tradition, we have a term for this idea that morality resides in our
hearts: natural law. It's the foundation of Catholic moral teaching. It's the
reason why the Ten Commandments looks so much like the moral codes of other
ancient civilizations. We know what's right in many circumstances, but for
whatever reason, like the priest and Levite, we choose not to do it.

That's what
it comes down to—a matter of choice, a matter of the will. And that brings me
back to the gospel reading again. Jesus has pretty much schooled the scribe on
the meaning of the second greatest commandment to love neighbor as self, but
buried in there as well is a lesson about the first commandment—the one that
comes to us from Deuteronomy 6:5, a most cherished passage from Hebrew
scripture called the Shema: Sh-ma, Yisrael. A-do-nai E-lo-hei-nu,
A-do-nai E-chad."Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God
is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your might." Now Luke and the other gospels vary slightly from the
Hebrew text of Deuteronomy. In Luke, the scribe says, "You shall love
the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being (or soul, which is
perhaps a better translation), with all your strength, and with all your
mind." Yes,
Jesus adds, "mind" to this passage. I won't get into the
technicalities of scriptural redaction here, but suffice it to say that the
word mind doesn't appear in the Hebrew. But its presence here is
important from a Catholic perspective.

You see,
love is not merely an emotion. It's not just that warm feeling we get in our
core when we really desire or prefer one thing over another. It's not merely a
heightened state of spiritual awareness of something's importance and value.
It's not just an internal experience. As DC Talk used to sing, love is a verb.
The word love is used in scripture almost exclusively as a verb. So love
is an act of the will.

And an act
of the will is an act that one chooses with the mind fully engaged. Your
feelings are all well and good, but if you don't make an act of the will to do
something, your feelings are inert. They go nowhere and accomplish nothing.

In the
context of the parable, this is important. To pious Jews, the mitzvot or
commandments of the law are not done simply to check boxes off of a form or for
external adherence to a code. You perform the commandments as an act of love
toward God. And to act, you must engage the will. But to refuse to act, you
must also engage the will. So priest and Levite in the story of the good
Samaritan choose not to perform an act of love to God, while the Samaritan
chooses to perform this act of love by loving his neighbor.

In a way,
the Pharisees get sort of a bum rap in much of our scripture because the whole point
of the law for them was to show their love for God in their daily lives.
And what Jesus is really calling out here is not those who adhere to the law in
letter and spirit, but those who choose not to follow the law when no one is
watching. In fact, the parable is about just that disconnect. You cannot show
love for God if your love stops at your neighbor's doorstep. You cannot show
love for God if it refuses the mercy that justice requires. Love of neighbor is
itself an act of love for God.

The greatest
act of love that we know is the act of mercy that Jesus performed up there and
in his offering, in which we will take part in a few moments. And mercy often
requires us to take up the cross and follow our savior. We are passing through
what seems to be a horrendous time of hatred and senseless violence, of
partisan rancor, of disillusionment. And instead of trying to find solutions,
too many of us are simply content with pointing fingers in the other direction.
Well, that's not working. As Dr. King wrote in his book Strength to Love
in another time of unrest and rancor, "Darkness cannot drive our darkness.
Only light can do that. Hatred cannot drive out hatred. Only love can do
that."

So will we embrace
mercy and cross the road? Will we allow our love to pass over the doorstep of
our neighbor and embrace the other? Will we let our own flickering flame dispel
some of the darkness in this difficult time?

I pray that
God will have mercy on us, and that we will have mercy on each other.

Wha?

I am a cradle Catholic who drifted away in my teens and wandered. My search
for truth led me to study comparative religion, New Age nonsense, and
philosophy. After 20 years as an agnostic, I came back to a faith that I never
really knew, but which I learn and love more daily. My restless heart now only
wishes to rest in Him. I have masters degrees in English and theology, black
belts in Shotokan karate (Ohshima) and Shaolin-Do kung fu, and classical
training in music that I've all but forgotten. I am a deacon for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise. This is a personal blog and does not represent the official views of my parish or diocese.

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